


And So The Balance Shifts

by peacefulboo



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/F, Flarrow Femslash Week, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 03:32:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5441861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefulboo/pseuds/peacefulboo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iris West hears whispers about Sara Lance for the better part of a decade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And So The Balance Shifts

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for day 3 of the [Flarrow Femslash Week](http://flarrowfemslashweek.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr. There's so much awesome fic and art coming out of it. Definitely check it out.

Iris West hears whispers about Sara Lance for the better part of a decade. The first time, she’s twenty years old and hears the news anchor speculating that there might have been a young woman accompanying Oliver Queen when the Queen’s Gambit went down. Sara Lance’s name is released three days later and, despite herself, Iris’s pulse quickens. 

She has had that name on the inside of her wrist since puberty hit. Sometimes she runs her fingers over the letters and wonder, what kind of soulmates would they be? The kind that were kindred spirits, friends who understand each other more than anything but not necessarily sexually compatible? The kind that can only stand to be around each other in the important moments but spend the other parts of their lives living on parallel but distant tracks? The kind that fall in love with each other and are never attracted to any other person for the rest of their lives? Over the millennia every type of soulmate pairing has been seen. 

The movies usually focus on the romantic and sexual soulmates. Sure, there’s the occasional film depicting a truly great political team up between soulmates, or the very popular partners in crime couples, but mostly it’s romantic soulmates separated by time and continents fighting their way to each other. And like most of America, Iris has a hard time letting go of the sense that your soulmate should be everything to you. 

Still Iris is never truly concerned that the Sara Lance that went down on the gambit with her sister”s boyfriend was _her_ Sara Lance. When she was fifteen, she googled the name and found just under a hundred individuals with that name in America alone, and those were just the ones that were easy to find. She figures that her Sara is one from the rest of that pool, not the one who is dead, since the name is still clear as day on her wrist. 

When the news of Sara’s return to Starling City reaches her, Iris wonders again if maybe this was her Sara, but she puts it to the back of her mind as she buckles down. She’s determined to get through grad school without killing herself or anyone else and she figures that, even if that is her Sara, she’ll meet her soon enough. They have all the time in the world. 

And then Barry, her best friend and as close to a soulmate as she thinks she’ll ever need, gets struck by lightning and she starts to wonder how much time she actually has. But she focuses on Barry and her Dad and, eventually, having fun with Eddie. Then Barry wakes up and she’s so fucking distracted that she almost doesn’t notice that the name on her wrist has faded from the dark, vivid black to the ashen grey that only means one thing. 

Sara Lance is dead. And that, as they say, is that. 

Iris feels hollow. She feels empty in a way she didn’t know was possible. It’s not devastation; she didn’t even know this woman, but she’s filled with a sense of longing, of yearning, that she knows in her bones will never go away. But Iris has dealt with loss in her life before and she moves through it as best she can. Eddie helps. He does. 

Then _he’s_ gone and this time she does grieve. Deeply and wholly and angrily. Eddie was a good man, a righteous man, and in different world he wouldn’t have had to hoist himself on his own fucking petard to save the rest of the world. 

They only really get the summer to grieve before crisis compounds crisis compounds yet another crisis. She’s glad to have the distraction from her dead lover and her dead soulmate and whatever is going on with Barry, and then her mom comes back and she could scream with how overwhelmed she is. Except she doesn’t scream. She barely cries. Instead she locks herself down and keeps moving forward to battle crisis after crisis after crisis. 

And then the silver lines burn hot and turn back to black. She takes to wearing chunky bracelets and longer sleeves just to keep the questions at bay. Because honestly? She doesn’t feel relief or joy that her soulmate has possibly returned from the dead (is that even a thing? Two earths is a thing, but death? It’s permanent right? Right?). No, she doesn’t feel relief at all. 

She stays away from Team Arrow when they’re around. She knows who they are and that’s enough to make her wary. She drifts off when Barry talks about their joint exploits, and finds that work is just too damn busy to skip out on when the rest of the team drops everything to help those in Star City or when Star City comes to them. Because right now? Her Sara could still be any Sara Lance in the world. 

Oliver Queen is the one to shatter her illusions. Iris gets the feeling that this man has a lot of fucking practice doing so. He’s in Central City more and more. At first, his whispered conversations with Barry in the curved, shadowed hallway of Star Labs obviously have nothing to do with her. But after the fourth visit or so that Oliver makes sans Team Arrow, he starts looking at her more, staring at her as though he’s trying to figure out a puzzle. He and Barry argue more and any subtlety that Oliver may have had when looking at her disappears, if it was ever there in the first place. 

He approaches her outside of her office one night in mid-February, go bag in hand like he’s heading home soon. 

“Iris,” he says with a nod in greeting. 

“Oliver,” she replies coolly. There was a time when this man’s eyes and arms could fluster her without him even trying, but that was a few deaths and a whole other Earth ago. 

“She’s here, you know?”

Iris can’t help but suck in a breath at that. Fuck him. 

“She’s been in Central City for a few months. I assume she’s the one that belongs to you. It’s been a long time since your mark was on her body - she’ll have to tell you that story - but I saw it. Before.” He sounds wistful. 

It makes her angry. 

“You don’t seem like the type to meddle.”

“You’re not wrong. But Sara...she’s special. And I think that maybe you are too.” He shrugs and adjusts the go bag in his hand before reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a card. It has Felicity’s name and information on the front and then on the back written in a neat, almost feminine hand, is a phone number and address. “She’s staying with her mom for now.”

***

Sara Lance has wanted to meet Iris West since she was eleven years old and first got her period and, consequently, her soulmark. She’s pretty sure that they will be best friends eventually but she’s in no hurry to find her. 

She takes a branding iron and burns the name off her arm early during her time on the Amazo. She’s glad of it later when she joins the League, since every league member has had their names burnt off and the names erased from their memory. Nyssa never even saw her own. 

But it doesn’t stop the soulmate from existing. Sara may not have remembered her soulmate’s name before she dies, but everyone else in her life from before does. They don’t talk about it, though, and so that year in Starling she doesn’t ask and they take the hint that she doesn’t want to know. 

Sara Lance dies not knowing just how few degrees separate her from the one person who might actually be able to give her a measure of peace. 

And then she’s pulled from the pit, and her soul is pulled from sheol and her body has no more scars and her memories from before the League’s conditioning are intact. She does scream. And cry. There’s so much inside of her that is angry and sad and frustrated, and it’s her sister and her dad and Ollie and superfucking heroes and assassins and bloodlust...it’s all too much for her. 

So she runs to her mother. Her mother who is one of the worst nurturers on the planet, but has always been the best one for her. She hides out, gets to know her mom’s husband, eats good food, drinks strong coffee and time passes faster than it has any right to. 

And then fucking Oliver Queen and Barry Allen suck her back into that world. Only now there’s time travel and new tensions and while she’s pretty pissed at first, inertia makes just getting out of her bed difficult, once they’re on that fucking ship, she gets stoked pretty quickly. She falls in love with Kendra and in lust with Carter and plays poker with Mick. And they save the fucking future. 

They really are quite glorious together. 

It’s hard to come back. Back to a stagnant time zone where life flows in one direction and they all scatter to the wind. They arrive ten minutes after they originally left. It’s weird and makes her skin feel tight around her. She finds Oliver and Barry at the labs, where Oliver, in civilian clothes now, looks like he’s getting ready to go home. 

He looks happy to see her. And then he sucks in a breath, his eyes fixed on something or someone over her shoulder. She’s a bit surprised when he pulls her into a big hug, but she hugs him back. She almost misses when his right hand skates down her left arm to settle around her left wrist. He rubs a thumb along the name there and says, “She’s here.”

Sara stiffens immediately. She is not ready for this. Not at all. But after a moment she kisses Ollie on the cheek, pulls back to look him in the eyes and tells him, “Tell Felicity about the kid. Today. She can handle it.”

She steps away from him, takes a deep breath to steel herself and then turns toward the bank of computers and faces the woman who will help everything fall into place. 

Iris West is beautiful. 

“We haven’t met. I’m Sara. Sara Lance.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I had more time to mess with this. Also, I didn't intend when I started writing this for this to be the beginning of a much longer story, but it kind of is. I'm just not sure if I'll ever get around to writing that story. I want to though.


End file.
